Dr Neil Jones Awarded the Sutherland Prize

The Faculty of Law warmly congratulates Dr Neil Jones on the award of the Sutherland Prize by the American Society for Legal History. The prize, which is awarded annually, is for the best article on English legal history published in the previous year. Dr Jones's article, 'Wills, Trusts and Trusting from the Statute of Uses to Lord Nottingham' appeared in the Journal of Legal History in 2010. (Journal of Legal History, 31 (2010) 273–98)

The Sutherland Prize, named in honor of the late Donald W. Sutherland, a distinguished historian of the law of medieval England and a mentor of many students, is awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Sutherland Prize Committee, to the person or persons who wrote the best article on English legal history published in the previous year.

The citation for the prize-winner read:

"The article by N. G. Jones, 'Wills, Trusts and Trusting from the Statute of Uses to Lord Nottingham', is an example of painstaking work on a technical topic that lights up the history of the common law, even to the point of upsetting long-established assumptions about the law’s development. The article deals with the aftermath of the enactment of the Statute of Uses in 1535. The Statute had the effect of abolishing the power to leave real property by will by employing a feoffment to uses to be declared in a will. The strong negative reaction to this change led quickly to enactment of the Statute of Wills in 1540, allowing testators to devise land directly, without creating a trust. Trusts to perform the settlor’s last will then quickly fell out of use. This article, making extensive use of manuscript sources, including the difficult records of the Court of Chancery, shows that the widely accepted story is much too simple. In fact such trusts continued to be used quite often and for a variety of purposes. This created new problems and it also opened up new opportunities for the settlement of interests in land. It had important effects on the history of the trust. Once integrated into general histories of English law, Neil Jones’ impressive work will change the way historians understand this important era in the history of the common law."